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Brand Yourself: Part 4
It's All About Content!
Why a Brand? A strong brand:
- Inspires your market
- Sets you apart from the competition
- Guides your market’s perception of your business
- Keeps your name and your value "top of mind"
- Ultimately gives your market a reason to use your business
Successfully branding yourself and/or your business requires taking a theme supported by stories with headlines and images. That's the 10,000ft view of successful business branding.
Let's zoom in a bit. In the last three marketing tips on business branding we introduced the idea of creating a strong elevator headline to capture audience attention. You're successful when your headline causes your listener to inquire further about your business.
Example:
Audience: "What do you do?"
You: "I help overworked business professionals find clients in their sleep."
Audience: "How do you do that?"
You: Follow up with your 30 second elevator response (the most recent SuddenlyInSite Marketing tip).
You're following the Basic Branding Formula:
- Build your expertise.
- Get people to recognize it.
With that 30-60 second elevator response (and all the additional good content you came up with that did not fit into the time frame) you now have content for the following:
1) A re-write of your website home page.
Turn your website home page into a dialogue that captures audience attention. Dialogues thrive on questions and answers.
Use a variation of your elevator headline and turn the content of your 30-60 second response into a question/answer format.Ask questions on your home page and let viewers click on the questions to find the answers.
Example:
"What are three things every business owner can do to find clients in their sleep?" (from elevator headline) This question leads to an article on the power of email marketing (content from the elevator 30-60 second follow-up), which then offers my services to set up a client-generating email marketing program. Two other options for the viewer are:
- Articles on linking your website to 1000s of other websites automatically
- Creating information product
2) Use the same content to write a business brochure, a one-page flier, a sales letter or an ad, a networking or media commercial, a video on u-tube.
Hear this next part carefully:
- When the content of your message comes from the same source/theme, you create unity of advertising. By making your website home page, your written marking collateral, and your spoken presentations all spring from your core theme (elevator and follow-up), you create this unity.
- And unity in your advertising unleashes the awesome power of leveraging. Every communication supports and builds on the other communications. Your audience needs to hear a message--receive an invitation--something like 11 times before they are ready to take action. You want to reach the point that your listener's mind responds to your message with the thought, "I've heard this before, there must be some truth here." The repeated theme with creative variations has begun to sink into their inner belief system.
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